The operation, codenamed DisrupTor, netted some $6.5 million (€5.5 million) in cash and virtual currency, as well as weapons and 500 kilos of drugs — such as cocaine, fentanyl, heroin, oxycodone and methamphetamine. German investigators did manage to take the Darknet marketplace “Wall Street Market” off the net in addition to digging up “Chemical Revolution” last year, thought to be the world’s second-largest illegal marketplace on the Darknet. When it was taken down in May 2019, over 5,000 sellers had posted more than 63,000 items for sale. By the time Ulbricht was sentenced to two life sentences in 2015, successor platforms had long since been online, attracted by the high profit margins.
German police said they seized the infrastructure of the popular illegal darknet marketplace known as Nemesis and took its website down. The wares it offered included drugs, fraudulently obtained data and goods, and cybercrime services including ransomware, phishing and distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attacks. The BKA emphasized that “darknet markets perpetuate a false sense of legitimacy,” with vendors often mixing drugs with lethal additives.
Ongoing analysis of seized data aims to unravel secondary networks, including money launderers and malware distributors. The change in tactics netted a record number of arrests for the operation, beating the 150 arrested following the takedown of DarkMarket, and 179 following the takedown of Wall Street Market. Users across multiple forums had previously expressed concerns about being victims of an exit scam, where marketplace administrators simply disappear with customers’ funds. Such signatures are intended to confirm that vendors still have access to their accounts and have not been arrested or compromised. While the method has its limitations, HugBunter argued that failure to provide a cryptographic signature alongside continued account activity could be telling. On the Reddit-style dark web forum known as “Dread,” users are trying to determine which vendors were compromised by the operation, Straight Arrow News found.
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Another thing that stood out to investigators was the routine nature of his deliveries. According to prosecutors, a courier from the Netherlands drove to the Gohlis district of Leipzig each Thursday to replenish Maximilian’s supply of drugs—investigators knew this from watching the package station and the entrance to his house. On February 24th, the authorities allowed Maximilian to meet the courier to receive 25,000 ecstasy pills, 20 kilos of hash, 10,000 doses of LSD and 27 kilos of amphetamine without incident.
Dark Web Drug Trafficking
One key moderator and six top vendors — some responsible for thousands of drug shipments — were arrested in Germany and Sweden. In total, the operation led to the seizure of 47 smartphones, 45 computers, large quantities of drugs, and assets worth €7.8 million. The number of arrests and amount of money seized were the most for any international Justice Department-led drug trafficking operation, he said.
The dark web is a collection of sites that are not indexed by search engines and can only be viewed with specialized web browsers designed to provide privacy and anonymity. Many sites specialize in selling illegal goods that are not readily available on the public internet. Cybercrime research firm Elliptic said Hydra has facilitated over $5 billion in bitcoin transactions since 2015, receiving a boost after the closure of a key competitor in 2017. At a press conference following the arrest, police were asked if the dealer had hidden all of the drugs under the bed in his childhood bedroom. However, even more damaging for the young criminal was the discovery of a text document on his laptop that gave unprecedented access to an organised list of deliveries dating back to the beginning of the website and also a list of logins for all of his accounts.
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- Silk Road 2.0 was launched soon after the original Silk Road was seized and since that time there has been a proliferation of darknet markets..
- This operation was aided by non-operational supporting participation from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and U.S.
- The video offered suggestions that multiple arrests were made at all levels of the Archetyp hierarchy, and although Europol’s official announcement only confirmed one was made – the 30-year-old German – the BKA said seven people were arrested in Sweden.
- BKA’s announcement says investigations into Nemesis Market started in October 2022, involving German, Lithuanian, and American agencies, including the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI).
The case naming Annibale was unsealed today when Brazilian authorities executed a search warrant at his residence. The news comes during a turbulent time for darknet markets with the most prominent sites closing down in recent months, either voluntarily or as a result of police activity. It is not clear which German authorities were behind the seizure, although Europol described it as happening alongside the seizure of the Hydra marketplace’s infrastructure. Unlike in the Hydra takedown, however, law enforcement did not replace Monopoly Market’s darknet site with a splash page.
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The purpose of these marketplaces on the Tor network is to provide users and providers of darknet services with anonymity and security, respectively. Transactions are carried out with the help of a cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin and dark wallets, which protect both the buyer and the seller. Europol’s statement about the scale of Archetyp Market’s operations and the coordinated international takedown is confirmed by multiple reputable sources.
Treasury International Capital (TIC) System
It was soon discovered Maximillian would meet a 51-year-old courier from Holland every Thursday to stock up his supply of drugs. Both of these factors caught the attention of local authorities who began surveillance on the young drug dealer. Despite all of these precautions, the drug lord made two vital errors that ultimately led to his arrest. Although the defendant appeared nonchalant, even smiling at times during his sentencing, Judge Göbel agreed the confession was worthy of a lighter sentence and ordered Maximillian S to spend seven years behind bars. During the trial, Judge Norbert Göbel said the defendant had been engaged in “highly criminal activity” and “flogged almost a tonne of narcotics” since late 2013.
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The suspect allegedly managed Archetyp Market alongside moderators and vendors, overseeing 17,000 drug listings, 3,200 vendors, and 612,000 user accounts. The announcement is the first confirmation that Monopoly Market’s disappearance was the result of law enforcement action. HugBunter, the anonymous user who founded the forum in 2018, asked “market admins, vendors, and other service operators” to provide “proof-of-life” by signing posts with what’s known as a PGP encrypted signature, a form of cryptographic proof.
The largest number of arrests were made in the U.S., which is in the grips of an overdose crisis. Synthetic opioids, mostly fentanyl, kill more Americans every year than died in the Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined. Payments on the platform were made exclusively with Monero, a privacy-enhanced cryptocurrency the architecture of which makes tracing blockchain transactions much more of a pain for authorities.
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Europol said German authorities seized Monopoly Market’s infrastructure more than two years ago, allowing the agency to create intelligence packages that were shared with international partners across Europe as well as in the United States and Brazil. Between 11 and 13 June, a series of coordinated actions took place across Germany, the Netherlands, Romania, Spain, Sweden, targeting the platform’s administrator, moderators, key vendors, and technical infrastructure. Around 300 officers were deployed to carry out enforcement actions and secure critical evidence. The operation targeted Archetyp Market, a platform with over 600,000 users and transactions totaling at least 250 million euros, underscoring the scale and ongoing challenge of illicit drug sales facilitated by anonymizing technologies. Shortly after launching, the image-heavy darknet marketplace developed a reputation as a one-stop shop for everything including ecstasy, MDMA, speed, cocaine, crystal meth, LSD and marijuana. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York of narcotics conspiracy, money laundering, and conspiracy to sell adulterated and misbranded medication for owning and operating Incognito Market, one of the largest narcotics marketplaces on the internet.
“The internet is not an area free of criminal prosecution,” German federal police President Holger Münch has repeatedly declared. But the Darknet perpetrators are difficult to prosecute — especially since drug-dealing is often “victimless crime” that neither party has an interest in reporting. The Federal Criminal Police Office in Germany (BKA) and the Frankfurt cybercrime combating unit (ZIT) conducted the action on Wednesday, March 20, 2024, with law enforcement taking down the website and confiscating approximately $100,000 in cash.
Where one marketplace collapses, Telegram facilitates dozens of replacements, each with lower visibility and faster growth curves. Instead of disappearing, Hydra’s network simply adapted to a new medium, underscoring the difficulty of suppressing illicit commerce with infrastructure takedowns alone. German law enforcement hasn’t responded to Recorded Future News’ request for comment about whether the website’s administrators were arrested. Visitors to the cybercrime website were greeted on Thursday with a red banner announcing the takeover. At the bottom, the police placed an animated spaceship reminiscent of a 1990s video game called Nemesis.
The platform only prohibited the sale of child abuse material, contract killing services, weapons, and Fentanyl-based substances. Two men from the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia are believed to be the masterminds behind the world’s second largest Darknet market that was taken down this week by US and European law enforcement. DarkMarket’s bust was not the first for German authorities, which have found illegal platform operators on German soil in recent years. In 2019, Koblenz prosecurots announced the discovery of darknet servers hosted from a former NATO bunker in a sleepy German town. Authorities say drugs, counterfeit money, stolen credit card data, anonymous SIM cards and malware were all traded on the site, which had a half a million users and transacted business in cryptocurrencies equivalent to a value of €140 million ($170 million).
